For use in a kitchen a waste disposer must be sufficiently versatile to satisfactorily process not just soft materials or viscous materials (such as fruit or cooked cereals) but also hard and tough materials (such as some vegetables and bones). Particularly in processing these latter materials the duration of grinding required is an important consideration in the design of a disposer.
Food waste in a conventional food waste disposer is forced by blades on a rotating grinding plate against teeth of a stationary grinding ring. Reduced processing times could be achieved if this action could be improved.
Additional time is also required, for example, if harder food fragments such as carrot and bone pieces rotate at the same speed as the grinding plate without being ground. This results in increased noise and vibration, as well as residual food left in the grinding chamber after the disposer is turned off. Over time, this residual food may cause unpleasant odours.
A further problem in designing a food waste disposer is jamming which occurs when hard objects such as bones enter the food waste disposer and get stuck between the blades of the rotating grinding plate and the stationary shredder ring.
It is an object of the present invention to overcome or substantially ameliorate the above disadvantages or more generally to provide an improved apparatus for disintegrating food waste.